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+# Hacking Pinakes
+
+Pinakes is a lot of things. One of the things it aims to be is _complete_. To be
+complete in features, to be complete in documentation and to be complete in
+hackability. This document covers, very comprehensively, how you may:
+
+- Build Pinakes
+- Develop Pinakes
+- Contribute to Pinakes
+
+for developers as well as:
+
+- Distribute Pinakes
+
+for Pinakes maintainers and packagers.
+
+## Building Pinakes
+
+Pinakes is built with Rust (nightly edition) and various crates. The most
+_notable_ crate among those is Dioxus, which provides its own toolkit. The UI
+for Pinakes is usually _not_ built with the Dioxus CLI but instead with
+`cargo build`. This also applies to distributable build results.
+
+[Direnv]: https://direnv.net
+
+To build Pinakes, simply pick the components you want and build them with
+`cargo build --release --package <component>`. A Nix shell is provided for
+reproducible developer environments and you may obtain all build dependencies by
+simply running `nix develop` or `direnv allow` if you use [Direnv]. Nix is a
+cross-platform build tool and works on most Linux distributions as well as
+Darwin. While distro-specific package managers _might_ work, Nix is the only
+supported one.